Building a recording studio

The problem with professional studios

I love a recording in a professional studio. I also love not spending my weekend acting as a roadie just to lay down some tracks. Then something needs to be fixed, and you need to go back to the studio. Booking a real studio means agreeing on a date that works for everyone, which for four musicians is roughly as likely as a lunar eclipse. Then you carry the amps down three flights of stairs, drive across town, carry them back up, discover the drummer left a cymbal at home, and pay by the hour for the privilege of remembering that. That was cool when we were kids, the schedules got a lot tighter as we got older.

Meanwhile there is the archive. Over the last few years we have collected around 500 phone recordings of jams and songs. Some are five minutes, some are two hours of one riff that refused to die. Phone mics are heroic little things, but they flatten everything into the same beige mush. Those recordings deserve to be tracked properly, on our own schedule, for the cost of electricity and coffee. So the plan is simple: build a studio at home and stop apologizing to the calendar.

What we already have

The starting point is better than it sounds. There is a room of about 50 square meters, which is enough air to let a drum kit breathe. There are good instruments. There are decent amplifiers that already make the sounds we want in the room. And there is love, which is not on any spec sheet but does most of the heavy lifting.

What is missing is the bit between the air and the hard drive: microphones, an interface with enough inputs, stands, cables, and a plan for routing all of it without turning the floor into a snake pit.

What microphones do we actually need

This is where most home studio projects give up. You start with one mic, then read a forum, and suddenly you need a different mic for every source, every genre, and every phase of the moon.

Luckily, Jim Lill has done the work to quiet down even the most doubting minds. We found this video and felt at ease with our decision. The argument it makes is the one every broke musician wants to hear: almost any microphone you think you need can be approximated with a humble Shure SM57. Point a 57 at it, move the 57 around, add a bit of EQ, and you are most of the way to the expensive mic you were about to buy. It is not literally true for every source on earth, but it is true often enough to be a sane default and a great excuse.

So the philosophy for this build: lean on the SM57 wherever it earns its keep, and only spend real money where a dynamic workhorse genuinely cannot reach, like overheads, room air, and the low thump of a kick drum.

Recording drums

Drums are the hard part, so they set the shape of everything else. The first idea was the Glyn Johns method. Three or four mics, almost no money, and it is the technique behind a lot of the cult John Bonham drum sound. Simplicity itself.

The layout looks like this, viewed from above the kit:

You put one mic over the snare and one out by the floor tom, set the same distance from the snare center so the two stay in phase, then add a kick mic out front. The whole kit arrives as a stereo picture with almost nothing in the way.

The verdict: good, and very tempting because it is cheap. But it was not the sound we were chasing. Glyn Johns gives you the room and the kit as one breathing thing, which is gorgeous when the room and the kit are both spectacular. Our room is fine. We wanted more control over each drum than three mics allow.

So we went shopping for a budget close-miking set. The best buy turned out to be the AKG Drum Set Session I: a kick mic, four clip-on dynamics for snare and toms, and a pair of small condensers for overheads. On top of that we add a dedicated mic for the snare top, another for the snare bottom (so you catch the wires and the crack, not just the thud), and two more out in the room for size. Counted up, that is eleven mics on the kit.

One more thing the drum session needs: a small amplifier for the pilot. When you track drums first, the drummer plays along to a rough guide recording of the song, the pilot. A little practice amp in the room plays that guide loud enough to follow without bleeding a hi-fi mix into eleven open microphones. Cheap, cheerful, and it keeps everyone in time.

The eleven-mic close-miking setup, viewed from above, looks like this:

Recording guitars

Guitars are gloriously simple after drums. The plan is three sources, captured at once so you can blend them later:

• A Shure 57 dynamic right up close to the center of the speaker cone, for the bite.
• A room mic about 30 cm back, for air and the sound of the amp actually moving the room.
• A direct line out from the amp, clean, so we always have a dry signal to reamp or blend.

Three takes on the same note, three flavors. If the close mic is too harsh you lean on the room. If the room is too washy you lean on the close mic. If both are wrong you still have the direct line and a second chance.

Recording bass

Bass follows the same logic with one extra friend. An AKG bass mic on the cabinet for the weight, an SM57 alongside it for the midrange growl that makes bass audible on small speakers, a room mic for size, and a direct out for the clean foundation. Bass lives or dies on that blend of clean low end and gritty mids, so having all four to mix between is worth the channels.

Vocals

Vocals go direct. No ceremony. The voice runs into a TC-Helicon VoiceLive Play, the pedal that does harmonies, reverb, and doubling in one box, and the pedal's stereo output goes straight into the interface. We track it in stereo so the harmonies and effects keep their width, then shape it in the mix where we can hear it against everything else. We record clean first, then reamp through the pedal for effects and blend it in the mix.

That is a lot of channels

Add it all up and it is clearly more than a small interface can swallow. The trick is that you almost never record everything at once. We track one instrument at a time, drums today, guitars tomorrow, so the question is not "how many mics exist" but "how many are live in the busiest single session." After a bit of tinkering, the answer landed at sixteen. Sixteen inputs is enough.

The catch is that most affordable interfaces give you eight good preamps, not sixteen. So to get the most bang for the buck, we need to bolt two boxes together.

Connecting it all over ADAT

The combination that did the trick is a Behringer UMC1820 paired with a Behringer ADA8200, linked by ADAT. This is a well-worn path; the TalkBass thread on chaining two interfaces over ADAT walks through the same idea.

The UMC1820 is the brain. It has eight XLR/jack combo inputs and the USB cable to the computer, and it runs on its own internal clock. The ADA8200 adds eight more preamps and speaks ADAT over an optical cable. The wiring is:

  COMPUTER
     |  USB
     v
 +------------------+        optical (8 ch IN)
 |  UMC1820         | <----------------------------+
 |  (master clock)  |                              |
 |  8 combo inputs  | ---------------------------->+
 +------------------+        optical (clock OUT)   |
                                                   |
                                          +------------------+
                                          |  ADA8200         |
                                          |  (ADAT slave)    |
                                          |  8 mic preamps   |
                                          +------------------+

  - ADA8200 ADAT OUT  ->  UMC1820 ADAT IN   (the 8 extra channels)
  - UMC1820 ADAT OUT  ->  ADA8200 ADAT IN   (clock + 8 returns)
  - UMC1820 = internal clock (master), ADA8200 = slave/sync to ADAT
  - Run at 48 kHz: ADAT carries 8 channels at 44.1/48 kHz, only 4 at 96

Two short optical cables, one in each direction. The ADA8200's eight preamp channels ride into the UMC1820 over the first cable and show up as inputs 9 to 16 in the recording software. The second cable hands the ADA8200 its clock so the two boxes stay in lockstep. The one rule worth tattooing on your hand: keep the project at 48 kHz. ADAT only carries eight channels per cable at 44.1 or 48 kHz, and just four at 96 kHz, so the moment you get greedy with the sample rate you lose half your inputs.

The full shopping list

Here is everything that went into the build. Cables and stands are boring until you are one short at 2 a.m., so they are on the list too.

The cabling plan

With sixteen inputs and a pile of cables, the temptation is to repatch everything for every session. Do that twice and you will start losing evenings to finding which XLR goes where. So the routing is fixed around the hardest job.

Drums are the most complicated to set up, so those eleven mics stay connected for drums all the time. Patch them once, leave them. That uses eleven of the sixteen channels and leaves five free.

Vocals run in stereo through a VoiceLive pedal, which takes two more channels. That leaves three.

Those last three are the flexible ones. When we record guitars or bass, we use them for the close mic, the room mic, and the direct out, swapping as each session needs. Since we track one instrument at a time, three movable channels on top of the permanent drum and vocal setup cover everything without ever rewiring the kit.

  16 channels total
  ├─ 11  drums        (always patched, set up once)
  ├─  2  vocals        (stereo, via VoiceLive pedal)
  └─  3  free          (guitar / bass: close + room + DI)

What is next

That is the whole skeleton of the studio, and after six months of using it, we could not be happier. Those phone jams are finally getting the treatment they deserve, and hearing it the way it sounded in the room is what makes it worth it.